


Scorched Earth

by speckledsolanaceae



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Avatar & Benders Setting, Loss of Identity, M/M, Multi, POV Alternating, Time Skips, rediscovering purpose
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:41:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24035257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speckledsolanaceae/pseuds/speckledsolanaceae
Summary: To scorch the earth is to remove or destroy anything your enemy could use against you. Sometimes your enemy is your own country, your own people, your own future. What then?(Following the different paths of three boys who eventually discover—or rediscover—each other in the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender.)
Relationships: Huang Ren Jun/Lee Jeno/Na Jaemin, Lee Jeno/Na Jaemin
Comments: 9
Kudos: 39





	Scorched Earth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yuzuzuyu (citrusyuz)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/citrusyuz/gifts).



> After a very long time, I finally have the first portion of this beast of a fic ready to publish. Thank you, Yuz, for your enduring patience and encouragement ♡ Unless I'm totally misunderstanding my planned trajectory, this should only come to four chapters. Pray for me and my long-winded ass.
> 
> Anyone reading who doesn't know _Avatar: The Last Airbender_ is more than welcome to ask questions in the comments or send me a cc (or dm on twt!!!).
> 
> I'll put the most basic necessary information in the end notes. If you find yourself lost, feel free to skip down ♡ 
> 
> Enjoy!

Before the Hundred Years War started—when tensions were high but didn’t need to be cut with a knife—a man from the nomads visited the Fire Nation for the Weighing of the Scales. It was a simple holy day, but an important one where the Eastern sector of the Nation looked at their wealth to assess what they thought they truly deserved.

It was a struggling tradition, but a staunch one, and Lady Ahn was the first to provide her presence to the central square. In handsome red silks, she approached the sprawling pagoda that blocked out the sun but harnessed the winds, breathed in the air, and knelt. She had already considered her worth, considered the muscles of her arms and the calluses on her fingers, the way the merchants looked kindly on her for not shying away from street food and common comforts (she did not need to drink wine from twisted turtleduck shells or eat with dainty utensils; cups were enough and so were her hands). But she still meditated on her selection of money as the lord’s only niece. She gnawed at her lip as she drifted back out of her meditation and slipped off her rings, her cuffs, her earrings, and curled her fingers around them as she leaned to place her bag full of coin on the altar. Her jewelry, too, she placed, and she slipped in her note of request that a great part of her contribution should go to repairing the sea nets and bolstering the soup kitchens.

When she finally looked up, she caught her face in the shining brass of the ornamented dragon bell, every etching done by old and young hands both, and felt like a child again without her trappings and gold—just as she did every year. A little lighter, a little more in touch with the flow of energy in her veins that held a quiet fire.

She picked herself up to her feet like she was less than a lady, but stood with the dignity of one, and when she turned, she saw the nomad in his oranges and sandled feet.

“Oh,” she said, “don’t you look dashing.” Her face went from pensive to broad in a smile that took up her entire expression.

“I look the same as always, Lady Ahn,” he assured her but smiled as well and offered his tattooed hand to lead her down the steps of the pagoda. His other hand held his staff, to her a symbol of impermanence. “The wind is so vibrant here. I can hear the bell humming.”

“Perhaps they had the humility of the nomads when they made it,” she said, and refused to part with his hand when he went to draw himself away. He obliged her insistence but not her flattery.

“We could still afford to be less proud,” he said, lips pinching around the words like he wasn’t keen, but wasn’t hiding his troubles from her, either.

She let the words sink around her as they walked toward the pier, the sun still low in early-morning cold. The sky was high and pale, not a cloud in sight, and the waters splashed sleepily as ropes were tightened by early-risers. “What brings you to me?” she asked when a bird sloughed off air in its path across them. “Did I miss a letter?”

“You did not,” he hummed and led her lengthwise along the docks to prevent them from stopping. “Sister Iio thinks that those of us who travel are best advised to maintain isolation as soon as possible.”

“Ah,” said Lady Ahn. “For how long?”

“It is merely precautionary. We are concerned with the politics we might exacerbate by crossing borders. We shall see if it is paranoia or truly apt.”

She nodded at this and wound her fingers into his only tighter. “How long do I have you?”

“Today, at most,” he said, then smiled while his eyes were diverted across the ocean. “Or tomorrow if you prove impossible.”

“It seems in my interest,” she teased, biting into the flesh of his humor and cradling the coolness of his hand and elbow. “I think you’ll stay until tomorrow.”

His responding noise was noncommittal, but bright, and as he was the one who proposed it, she was sure he could be convinced.

* * *

He did stay the night and into the next day, though he left at noon, and no more than a month passed before the genocide crossed Lady Ahn’s ears. She wished more than anything that she had told him of her wedding day.

* * *

Jaemin’s father chewed on his thumbnail halfway down the table from him, boring holes into his temples like a brand held to his skin.

This is not something the man did to all his progeny—just his eldest. Just the one sitting and staring at the plate of food he couldn’t eat yet because his father hadn’t yet touched his own. Both parents had to eat before the children did, but his father was apparently interested in withholding things on this evening.

Across from Jaemin sat his sister, fiddling with her chopsticks and worrying her lip. His little brother had long been taken from the room after crying at the stifling silence.

Jaemin wished he were so young to have that reaction. It’s what he wanted to do.

“We have to send him away,” his father said, and his mother, like she’d been waiting for fire, slammed her chopsticks down with such a clatter they knocked over her cup. Water spilled across the cream tablecloth and turned it dark. She did not seem to care.

“Who is _‘we’?_ Pray tell,” she flared, blunt nails flashing a fresh coat of crimson.

Jaemin did not move.

“Is there a law that states I must bear only children who can bend?” she continued, low, heated as far as the bearpossum cuts between them.

“No,” he said, drawn out and just shy of snappish himself. “But that is not the c—”

“Then may I not have a son who is in between?”

“I mean that we ought to—”

“Oh, _yes._ Yes, let’s discuss this at the _dinner table_ before discussing it in private!” She stood up, discarding her napkin and snapping her fingers once in her husband’s direction. “Come, then, if it is so urgent, we’ll go speak in the sitting room. Children, you may eat.”

“Ahn, It’s not as bad as—”

“I said _come.”_

His father gave an angry shudder and pushed himself out of his chair, storming after her blood orange robes. The fires in the wall sconces shivered uncomfortably, and to Jaemin, as the door out of the dining room slammed and he flinched, the meats and noodles of dinner looked a shade more green than anything not-green ought to look.

“I’m not hungry,” he murmured and stood slowly, the tablecloth skimming his scabbed and sore knees. His sister didn’t make a single peep as he leaned over and passed his palm over his mother’s spill. The cloth gave a hiss and let off a heavy rise of steam that left it dry, and he took his hand back, curling his damp fingers into his chest. “If they come back and ask, I’ll be in the smaller courtyard.”

He left through the opposite door to his parents’, breathing in slowly as he tried to stop himself from running. The lacquered stone underfoot shone up at him as he looked down, reflecting the sconces, the decor, his narrow, pinched features.

Though the smaller courtyard was farther from the dining room and living quarters both, it was his preferred place to simple _be._ It felt clear from all the polish, more open, and it was elevated from its rise up the hill—he could see the town in its entirety as he made his way up the stairwell.

On this evening, where the sun was merely a boiling yolk on peach waters, the air was stagnant and heavy with summer. But in the small courtyard, there was the barest hint of a breeze. There was also Jeno.

“Skip out on dinner?” asked the tutor’s son breathlessly as Jaemin climbed the last steps in bare feet, his shoes long discarded into the hook of his fingers. The stones of the treads were warm against his soles, and the bulrush hemming the fringe of the court were bent as if in greeting. A lick of balmy air eddied through the stalks, the building pillars, his legs.

“My dad wants to send me away,” Jaemin said without prelude and dropped his shoes on the flat stone of the courtyard’s entrance. Jeno slowed in his actions as he crouched to right a metal lantern on the other side of the court. The taste of the air made it obvious that he’d been practicing as usual, dark in his throat like seared oxygen. From some distance away, Jaemin could still see Jeno’s amber eyes skate over him from bare foot to brow, concern tucking into the shape of his lips.

“In what way?” he asked, raising himself to a stand and the lantern with him. On a better day, Jaemin would have fixated on the flex of his bare arms or the way his training trousers hugged his ankles. His chest felt too tight, though, and the tutor’s boy had an expression too worried for coveting.

"I don’t know,” Jaemin said, crossing the stonework between them, and Jeno opened his arms on instinct. Jeno’s entire body was hot to the touch, sweat a fresh sheen on his skin for Jaemin to press his lips to. He smelled like warmth and effort and fire.

“I’ll go with you,” Jeno said, breath and heart slowing down from his workout against Jaemin’s embrace.

“No you won’t,” Jaemin said. Jeno had a family where they lived—in their home with his mother and out by the docks where his father fished—and a promising future ahead.

Jeno hummed, squeezing Jaemin tighter and rubbing his nose up against the side of his head. “Yes I will.” He let him go with an air of finality, pushing him gently away by the hips, and Jaemin’s heart strained in the strange panic resulting from Jeno’s stubbornness.

“You—”

“Candles are set up,” Jeno said, smiling sweetly, and they were. In the corner of the court was a half moon of squat soy candles. Jaemin let his apprehension and irritation bubble up into his expression but sidestepped Jeno to force himself toward the candles nonetheless.

At seventeen, Jeno and Jaemin had been at some form of training for five years, and his mother had been their household tutor for even longer. Before Jaemin had bridged the gap between their inconsequential difference in “status,” he had watched him practice firebending in this very courtyard for ages—removed as it was from the Ladyship’s home.

On the surface, Jeno was a remarkable bender and had traveled to study under several masters of various high esteems. If he meditated and practiced breathing for long enough, Jaemin had even seen him produce small jumps of crackling static, a talent that was only heard of in small, patchy doses. People jested with real promise that he might serve under Azulon in a few more years should the Firebird pass away. He was not yet of age, but his calling would come upon him soon.

Jeno was everything everyone had hoped Jaemin would be.

He plopped down inside the arc of candles and forced himself to exhale all his stale breath. Jeno did not bother him—he simply left the court altogether to run the stairs as Jaemin tried to find his core and center.

He could feel the heat around him, could feel it in the way it eddied like water and curled over his bare wrists and through his fingers. Even with his eyes closed and the red tint of the late sun seeping through the thin skin of his eyelids, he could sense where the candles were. He was conscious of the twine of their wicks, the warmed paste of the wax, the way they were rooted to the stones by heat and the prints of Jeno’s fingertips. 

Traditionalists claimed fire came from passion—from the chest and the belly, and never in the throat where it clenched too hard for control. Never in the jaw where feelings became a tic in the muscle and grated up into the brain in a susurrus of noise.

Jaemin breathed in, mindful of the humid glow of air sucking through him as slowly as he could manage, mindful of how it brewed in his lungs, tightened, held, illumined there like dust reflecting light. He focused on the wicks, felt them so keenly it hurt in the pinch of yearning in his chest, and exhaled with a tingle in his palms and fingers.

He didn’t have to open his eyes.

The wind murmured condolences down his cheek and around his neck for the fire he could not produce.

Only heat.

When he opened his eyes, there was the beginning of a puddle creeping toward his toes, the candles now squashy and slanted, the grooves of Jeno’s fingerprints long gone.

Jaemin swallowed around the rising pain in his throat, licked the pad of his thumb and forefinger, and pinched the unburned stalk of the candle right in front of him. It sizzled pathetically.

He could never get it hot enough to burn.

“You amaze me,” said Jeno, who had reached the top of the stairs again during Jaemin’s prolonged focus. There was no flush in Jeno’s cheeks or rise in his chest, as if any effort was no effort even if it was running thirty steps twice.

“Don’t mock me,” Jaemin said, sinking into the heat of late day and the seventeen years of pain and longing resulting from not having a right to his place in his household. He’d been told he was a bender since he was young—the oracles could tell from the way his energy moved through his tiny hands and feet and belly. And yet.

“I’m not,” Jeno said.

“This is why they’re sending me away,” Jaemin said with a little more force, and it bent its way through his throat and made his words strain and crack in the middle. He looked down at his hands.

Jeno did not respond. But he did move toward him, the soles of his feet brushing against the decorated stones between them. Jeno took a breath when he crouched and reached for one of Jaemin’s hands over the candles. “I’ve asked my mentors every year of my life. What new fire benders do. Children.” Jeno’s thumbs pressed into the center of Jaemin’s palm hard enough to make the muscles there ache then smoothed his touch out. He looked up into Jaemin’s eyes so close Jaemin could see every one of his lashes and the crowns in his irises. “They burn things. They hurt themselves. Too much power or too little. Smoke, but no control.” He leaned closer and settled his forehead against Jaemin’s. “Even I don’t have the control to do what you do. I don’t understand it. I wish I could show you to them.” Jaemin could feel Jeno radiating heat, steady and slow, and the way his breath tasted like ginseng. He closed his eyes against the proximity, and by shutting the physical image out, Jeno felt ever closer, tugging on the tangle of energy in Jaemin’s chest that told him he wasn’t enough. “You enhance fire better than anyone I’ve ever seen. Who cares if you can’t ignite anything? You’re incredible.”

Jaemin could feel his own exhale brush Jeno’s lips. In a way Jaemin couldn’t use words to explain, Jeno was spiritually leaning into him like he was trying to catch his discarnate waist and hold him even closer. Jaemin spoke out in the muddle of warmth and aching in his body before he could think. “Keep talking like that and I may kiss you,” he warned, words tight and airy in his throat.

“Do it.”

_“Master Jaemin!”_

Jaemin jolted away, the precarious twining of his energy with Jeno’s snagging and tearing. His breath rose in his chest like a hurricane as he looked over to the top of the stairwell where one of the handmaids was lifting her skirts up the steps. “Master Jaemin,” she said, finally spotting him while Jeno leaned gently back onto his heels, “Lady Ahn is calling for you.”

“Right,” Jaemin said, forcing his rattled heart to settle, forcing it to remember what was hanging over his head. “I’ll be right there.”

Jeno looked at him with quiet hesitation as the handmaid left back down the stairs with her panting effort. Jaemin pushed himself up to a stand. “I’m sorry I couldn’t spar with you,” Jaemin told him.

His gaze was held for two long breaths as if Jeno was engraving himself into Jaemin’s skull. He endured it. “If they send you away, don’t leave without me.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“I’m serious.”

Jaemin struggled, feeling like some of Jeno’s static was filling the space between his ears. It didn’t make sense. If Jeno went into service at the capital, there was no way he would be able to keep Jaemin with him. They would part eventually anyway, wouldn’t they? One year sooner wouldn’t destroy them.

But his mother was calling, and he didn’t have the moment to argue with the tutor’s stubborn prodigy, so he said, “No,” turned heel, and left him in the smaller courtyard where the heat of the air made everything brighter.

* * *

“Jaemin,” his mother said with her hand clasped in her husband’s, “we have to send you away.” The silence in the room pushed into Jaemin until there was no room to breathe, the walls closed, the curtains drawn, the fires flickering in numb disapproval.

She was sincere. She was so sincere while she looked at him from the foot of the bed with her off-red robes and hair down. She held her husband’s hand tighter as if they hadn’t acted at each other’s throats a mere hour prior. “Your father will announce that we’re sending you away to train. The people here will believe we’ve given up on teaching you ourselves and that’s better than the alternative.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We’re sending you away for your safety, and it won’t be for training. It will—”

“Am I not safe here?” The static was growing mad in Jaemin’s head, bringing tears to his eyes before he bade them welcome.

“No,” his mother breathed. “You’re too conspicuous—”

“As a failure?”

Lord Kez lurched as Jaemin’s tears spilled over, hot like anger when all he felt was hurt. Jaemin shied away from his callused hand and gold-glowing eyes. “Jaemin, you’re not a failure. We haven’t—”

“Where am I going?” Jaemin demanded, shaking in the stifling heat and the intensity of his parents’ attention. “What am I in danger of?”

His mother’s free hand crinkled in her robes, and the other she had ensnared in her husband’s grip tugged him back to her side. The motion seemed like a moment of betrayal to Jaemin, who could hardly see more than colors through his tears. “The Earth Kingdom,” said his mother, voice not wavering in pitch nor execution. “You need to leave the Fire Nation. And therefore us and everything here.”

Jaemin choked on an exhale, needing something to cling to but having that denied him as he stood two feet away from his parents. He’d never once stepped foot out of the district his mother oversaw—had hardly even looked over the invisible perimeters. If the Fire Nation outside his mother’s jurisdiction was strange to him, the Earth Kingdom was so entirely unknown that he wasn’t even sure how to envision it.

“You cannot return,” his mother continued. “It is not that you are not loved here, but we cannot have you and cannot welcome you in safety.”

“Why now?” Jaemin blurted, struggling to sink his fingers into a concept moving too fast for him to fully comprehend. “What’s happened?”

“Sozin is more restless than ever as his death day nears,” she said, “and he’s starting to look within his own borders.”

Jaemin’s mind spun so quickly he thought for a moment that his knees might give out. “The Firelord? I don’t understand?”

Through the blur of his vision, he could see his mother bring her hand to her face and rub over her lips with her thin fingers. “You are not the person he is looking for. You are twelve years too young, but your father and I have reason to believe you are in danger nonetheless.”

Nothing his mother was saying sounded like anything more than mere sounds shoving their way through his head. He could not figure why Sozin was being brought into conversation at all. “What?”

“He’s hunting for the Avatar, Jaemin, and you are an airbender.”

* * *

He was given until morning to get ready—the sooner the better, in his father’s words. His siblings were not to be told, and neither was a single soul in the household. They’d ensured that their argument after the dinner table had been less than private and far from the truth. It would travel through the serving hands and through their district and perhaps far enough to become something of a real gossip.

He was the Lady’s son, too much of a failure to have hope for the private bending tutors he never had. He’d thought of it so rarely—that he’d never been provided tutors to hone his bending. He’d been given books and scrolls, and his mother had trained him in little things like breathing and energy flow, but no one had ever been brought in to evaluate him. He’d never wanted it, exactly, for knowing the shame would be immense, but didn’t realize there were any deeper reasons.

This settled in his stomach with the rest he was saddled with. Friends he no longer had would believe he was shipped off to become less of a disgrace than he was, but he wouldn’t be coming back. He would become a rumor. A memory.

He was expected to leave on his own despite not knowing much of anything, and he was meant to be a child who stole away in a passion of upset. This was far from anything Jaemin would choose to do with his life or his passions.

As he pulled the cinch of his bag taut, the securing rope burned against his fingers. His surroundings hadn’t stopped moving since he’d left his parents’ bedroom. The floor seemed to be dodging his feet, and the fires lighting his world had turned unfriendly. They fluttered in their sconces, strange and condemning.

His directions were detailed but simple. He was to leave through one of the windows and walk to the farthest docks in their district. His mother had secured him papers to the Earth Kingdom. He would service himself as necessary on the boat but not reveal his identity unless absolutely dire. His way was paid, and he had enough money to complete his journey and then some.

From the shores of the Earth Kingdom, he would pay for animal transport until he hit the town of Gaoling, far from the frontline of Firelord Sozin’s advances. In a village in the town outskirts, he would find a distant friend of his father’s who would help him obtain room, work, and board to pay his way through the rest of his life under the guise of being a nonbender. That was the most essential part. He was to never bend again—to attempt either element in his blood, not that he could do anything with fire anyway.

Feeling a little less than himself, Jaemin elbowed the window out of his room open and dropped himself into the brush less than two feet down. His pack held some slow-perishables, a change of clothes, a map, and some money, but little else. Under his shirt, though, was the fire opal pendant Jeno had given him some years back.

He couldn’t take Jeno, but he could, at the very least, take the necklace.

* * *

He fiddled with it in the wan, milky light of early day. The docks were awake but sleepy, the sailors and tradesmen shuffling along with their crates and netting. The seabirds were rising from the slow, lapping tides, and Jaemin walked through the briney air with shivering lungs. He thought of how the cold breeze furled off the ocean and knocked into him, the way it touched through his hair and shoved it into his eyes.

Jaemin couldn’t figure out if he was psyching himself into thinking he should have known he was different or not. Just because there was a connection didn’t mean he knew somewhere deep inside that he was “special.” It had to be true that sometimes, people just knocked around blind with no internal compass to guide them. He’d thought he was a firebender, he’d executed it to the only degree he could manage with the abilities he had in his possession, and that was the end of it.

Now, his eyes were uncovered a bit, but unless there were other bastard children out in the wide world, there would be no possible way for him to learn how to bend properly. His people on the other side of his blood were long dead.

Not that he was supposed to airbend anyway.

Jaemin breathed out a tight breath upon approaching the last cargo boat at the docks, sat on one of the crates near the on-plank, and let the wet sea wind roll over him just like anyone else would experience it. 

He wasn’t special. He never had been. He was a bender given the wrong direction to walk in, but mimicking firebending was the closest he’d ever come again to it. If he’d bended his true element in the beginning, he could’ve died, so perhaps it was better he got a chance to try something of it at all.

When the captain approached, he handed her the letter his mother had sent him with, and she barely glanced at it before flicking her wrist at him to climb onboard. He’d been on boats many times in his life, so the shifting ground beneath him neither startles him nor brings him an impending sense of nausea. He wondered if there could possibly be something less like home than the Earth Kingdom—surrounded by mountains, flora and fauna he didn’t know, weather patterns he could not parse.

His chest ached, but he did not step off the boat back onto the docks. Nor did he, in the weeks of travel that progressed after, step off the boat into the splitting waters below. He continued to feel somewhat hollow as the days slipped past.

The quartermaster of the ship assigned him things to do because he failed to hide that he was “kind of glum.” This ship was an Earth Kingdom ship—his mother made sure of that—and it already had hints of being utterly foreign, but he got used to the metal-reinforced, wooden smell of the hull mixing with the sea spray, and he got used to the captain and her tangled locks and attitudes.

So drastic a change in setting and atmosphere put him through the gamut before he could even get to the Earth Kingdom, which was, in retrospect, a good thing. At the very least, he was familiar with how ships sounded, moved, existed and continued to stay together. It was the longest he had spent on a ship for sure, but by the time they would reach the coastline of an entirely new world, he would feel like there wasn’t much that would unseat him. He was already uprooted and shaken—whatever he found waiting for him would not upset him any more than the things he had already experienced.

* * *

“You’ve never ridden an ostrich horse?” 

The stable master had such an absurd beard that he could have parted it and thrown it over both shoulders. His rough hands stroked down the long, thick neck of the creature in question, fingers sifting through the coarse feathers. In truth, Jaemin had never even seen an ostrich horse before. It clicked at him beakily, eyes beady and squinted around ridged eyelids.

“I’ve never needed to travel such a distance,” Jaemin admitted, and hoped that was enough information. He had a string of Earth Kingdom currency he could pull out of his bag, but he had enough sense not to show those cards. He’d have no simple income until he was at the end of this journey, so he had to be careful.

“Where are you headed?” asked the stable master.

“Gaoling.”

The man gave an incredulous chuckle. “That truly is ‘such a distance.’ Try to hit a caravan on the way, boy, if you’re traveling alone like it looks you are.”

Jaemin shifted his pack as the man handed over the lead for the creature, the strap oily in Jaemin’s hand. As it crowded into his space, he felt particularly small and unsuitable to literally everything ahead of him. Including this pseudo-bird.

“She’s docile,” the stable master said. “Won’t nip.”

She murmured her beak at Jaemin, and he reached for the same crest of feathers the man had stroked through, feeling for himself their odd coarseness and the iron muscle beneath them.

The journey was ahead of him, and he was now resigned to the knowledge that everything would be strange and nothing would feel like home. Not if he didn’t have one in the first place.

She made a low, thrumming noise unlike any sound he expected from such a creature, but she inclined her head in a way that almost made him smile. Everything was happening too fast for him to mull the big details over, but perhaps the alone time spent with this mount would be enough for him to decide.

Her step was quiet on the cleared dirt paths, rendered smooth by the focus of the benders who made them. There were the barest hints of wheel treads in how the dust curled up in lines, and turf tickled the edges of the road, but everything felt trim and purposeful. For the Fire Nation, their roads were of laid stone, hiccuping wheels wherever there was a swell of the cobble.

She was steady under him, gait level and cloth saddle not slipping off her back despite every moment he felt like he could keel over the side. He’d never ridden anything in his life—had already bent to wrap his arms around her neck as soon as there were citizens out of sight, which had taken some time, the squat trees of the Earth Kingdom sitting still at the roadside.

He waited for when the shake and dull ache setting into his thighs would become numbness as he pressed his cheek to her feathers and felt her heartbeat in his arms. Above them, the sky was empty aside from an errant handful of birds sliding across the sun.

The silence crawled up the skin of his legs hair by hair until his heart thudded with it in his chest.

“The stable master said you have many names,” he murmured into the plumage of his ostrich horse, sharper than he thought it would be whenever her step rose him against her grain, “and that I should give you a new one.”

He felt no response from her.

“I’m working backwards from my home,” he continued. “Shall I name you Na? My mother’s name is Lady Ahn. Backwards from that.” He pressed his lips into her and dragged a breath in through his nose, the oil preened into her feathers foreign and smelling of dust. He realized, in silence, that he never asked whose child he was or whether he was their child at all. “But if I’m my father’s child, you’d be Zek.” He rubbed his thumbs into her plumule, the pack of her feed and his pack digging into the backs of both thighs. 

He could feel the skin of his forearms tighten and forebode a burn as the sun had reached and passed its peak, but to drape something over them would require him getting off of his mount, and he wasn’t sure he could figure out how to get back on again. All he knew from the map tucked under his leg between his pants and her cloth told him to continue on this road until he reached a new town. He had few intentions of dismounting.

The air of the Earth Kingdom was dry and rough in his throat, agitating a sore where his inhales hit his airways. He wondered how long it would be without water before he crumbled to nothing. But for now, he could hear his bottle slosh from the port’s well.

His throat tightened without subtlety, and for the twenty-one steps he counted, he could not choke out any more words. He worked air through the vice of emotion in his neck, eyes burning dully. “You be Zek and I’ll be Na,” he said finally, and when she thrummed in his arms, he thought perhaps she was agreeing with him.

She wasn’t.

He lifted himself upright from her upon hearing the sounds of a jog, gripping her lead hard to keep himself from tilting.

“Hail!” this man called, cap long and thrown around his neck. As he approached, Jaemin could see his skin was tan, eyes dark, and something about his figure taut and sure as he approached—enough that Jaemin shifted in his seat and tried to appear its confidence’s equal. “You’re two hours out from Liko. Where are you headed?”

The man came close enough to touch the calf of his leg. There was a clack of metal at the man’s hip, and Jaemin didn’t have to use his eyes to know what it was that was making the sound. Ahead of them, he could now see a low, rough-hewn structure of sorts made from rock. There were two other people propped up in the shade of its overhang, one bare-handed and the other with a staff strapped to their back.

“Are you patrol?” Jaemin asked.

“Somewhat,” said the man. “If you’re taking this road, there’s about a mile detour ahead of hazard ground—”

“Hazard ground?”

“Badgermole territory.” The man chuckled. “We’re able to launch you a temp road over the zone—we’re all benders, see—but it costs some money.”

Jaemin hummed, flinching his grip around the lead for the moment that Zek shifted just a little more to the left in her step. He knew about badgermoles being the Earth Kingdom’s spiritual foundation, but he thought they’d lived in mountains. “I think I might have to take the detour,” he said, avoiding looking in the man’s face for the uncomfortable nature of denial. “I don’t mean to prevent you an income, but I’m afraid I can’t afford it with how long I have to travel.”

The man sucked in a breath and tilted his head, but didn’t look more agitated than that. “You’ll want to follow the left path, then. Bit narrower and less neat, but so long as it wasn’t dusted up, it’ll curl back to this here road again eventually. ‘Bout a mile, though, as I said.” Jaemin followed the man’s gesture with his eyes, across the front of Zek and over to the left where there was wear in the turf and underbrush like a route made out of inconvenience. Which it seemed to be.

“Thank you,” he said, putting sincerity in his voice for honest measure. “I wish you good business.”

“Safe travels,” the man said, and Jaemin took to the left path.

He should have listened to his second thoughts.

He only looked back after what must have been twenty minutes of walking Zek along their little path. The landscape was by no means hilly in the surrounding areas, so the earlier shade structure should have been visible enough.

It was nowhere to be seen.

Jaemin hesitated in every way, reeling Zek back by the lead to stop her from walking any further. He scanned the sky, then the brush, taking in the subtle swell around the edges of the path and the dusky leaves of the scraggly flora. He looked out on an ocean of bland unfamiliarity with his hand sliding anxiously down Zek’s ungentle feathers.

She grew uneasy beneath him, shuffling her feet, hearing something he physically could not.

He hugged her neck hard, kicked into her sides with his heels, and she bolted.

The ground shattered like glass plummeting upward, chunks spinning like bone dice. He believed he must have the luck of an endangered species, which was none at all.

He saw silhouettes, he heard a tight, precise whir of something moving quickly.

And that was it.

The sky was night the next time he looked at it, purpled and bright with stars unobstructed by fire or lamps. A flower kissed his cheek.

He didn’t need to move to know his body had hit the ground and bruised all up his side, that his head had spun and strained his neck and knocked his brain against his skull, that the throbbing at his temple wasn’t an oddity so much as a cause. He didn’t need to shift his hurting eyes to know that Zek was missing, and with her his pack. It took a long, painful breath for him to know his necklace was gone, the pendant not there to tug at the skin of his chest or slide against his sternum.

The world sat unchanged around him.

Seemingly, given the circumstances, he had only one real option: to return to the town he’d docked in. 

And because there seemed to be only one real option, he was inclined to realize he didn’t much care.

Now that he had hit the ground and nothing was carrying him forward—not a boat, not his feet, not a beast, not a numbness he couldn’t see through—he was left in the dust of inertia that made moving again more pitiful than the condition he was currently in.

What did he have, exactly, ahead of him?

He hadn’t been living his life just for the sake of it before. He wanted things. He wanted acceptance and love, wanted to give it back a thousandfold. He was more selfish than he had given himself credit.

The bushes and wild grass shivered up against a curl of wind, and Jaemin pushed himself up to a cross-legged sit, forearms and palms digging into the dust. From so low, there was only the same things stretching on for always, straggled dwarf trees making themselves seen every stretch of vision or so.

Under freckled skies and amidst free-flowing weeds stretching to meet the stars, Jaemin reached out and caught the tail end of a snake of wind just as it slipped past him.

Something quiet in his chest yawned and shook itself alive as he tugged it in toward his heart. The entire motion pulled everything in his arms, crawled up his throat, shrugged through his lungs.

He breathed in night and exhaled day.

**Author's Note:**

> Basic info: AtLA is a universe where there are four nations, each of which can (if they are born with the ability) "bend" four different elements: air, water, fire, and earth. There is a figure called the "Avatar" who maintains peace between all four nations and can bend all four elements—they go through a cycle of being born in one of the four nations and contain all their past lives to help them keep the peace. The Fire Nation, rising in power and keen on the idea of world domination, committed genocide against one of the nations (the Air Nomads) in an effort to find and kill the next Avatar.
> 
> The main series concerns itself with the Avatar and how he manages to escape this tragedy. _This_ story is set in the hundred years between the genocide and the Avatar's return. In other words, there will be no Avatar in this story, and it will not concern itself with any events in the actual television series aside from any major historical events.
> 
> Might take me a while to get the next chapter up! Or it may take me a week. I won't pretend like I know how this works. Either way, I will try my best to get it up within a month or less ♡ Until next time!
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/speckledsolana)   
>  [curiouscat](https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1)   
> 


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